Thursday, March 05, 2015

Meta: Reboot

I've been thinking about updating this blog and resuming a regular blogging schedule. I think about this probably several times a week. If I blogged every time I thought about blogging, you'd all have something to read on a regular basis. So then I started wondering what is holding me back, and I figured it out (I think).

Bear with me as I go a little meta.

The first rule of blogging is that blogging about blogging is boring. But I need to do this to get unstuck.

The second rule of blogging is never blog about your work. While a lot of people in my organization do blog about their work, and although doing so is considered a great tool for promoting the work of our organization and bringing attention to serious advocacy issues, for some reason I feel very resistant to the idea of flipping this into an advocacy or PR blog.

Blogs have genres; this started as a knitting blog and then migrated into mom-blog territory when I had kids. I feel like the golden age of the blog was when we lived in Albania and I used this space as an online diary for documenting our experience there as well as milestones in the children's development - we were so far from our families, that it was an important tool for connecting with them. So in that sense it became an expat mommy blog.

So why isn't it still? When we moved to Colombia, I moved into a new role in leadership, sharing the national director position with my husband. I was still writing my dissertation as well. The first 18 months here were a long, dark haul of fairly intense stress because of the wave amplification effect of these three processes - adjusting to the job, trying to finish the dissertation, adapting to a new country and culture. All this while caring for our kids in their own processes of adaptation and adjustment.

About 6-8 months ago I started to come out of that dark hole. But in the meantime I fell out of the habit of blogging. I didn't have time, I didn't have energy, I didn't know what to say... Honestly, I didn't really want to write about the hard parts of living here. It was too personal, and this is - ultimately - a public blog.

Now that I have the time and energy again, I still don't know what to say. I can write about the kids, our pets, our neighborhood, the city we live in... I don't know how to write about our work. Because our job title is literally to be representatives of our organization in Colombia, I'm perhaps hyper-aware of how I am representing that work on my blog (remember that second rule of blogging...?)

I was thinking recently about something I heard a memoirist say (and I paraphrase): remember when you are telling your story that you are the narrator, not the protagonist.

So, with that aphorism in mind, I'm going to give it another shot here. I'm going to narrate our lives here, knowing that the narration is always partial, perspectival, incomplete. I might end up writing about our work from time to time. We'll see how it goes.